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By Root 4012 0

any indigenous Hawaiian chant—for example, the Kauai prayer “Hanohano Pihanakalani”—had more connection to the natural environment of Hawaii than a page by Twain, London, or Stevenson. Natives sang of the exquisite uplands, mountain shells, mokihana trees, and rare terns.15 But the literary “nature fakers” gave false pre-Darwinian descriptions of tropical vegetation that didn’t even exist on the islands. Didn’t Twain have eyes for the Hawaiian stilt, with its long pink legs? Couldn’t London comment on the green sea turtles? Wasn’t Stevenson competent enough to write about one of the forty species of sharks in the waters of Hawaii? The point was obvious: these literary men couldn’t have distinguished a hammerhead from a whitetip reef shark. Why didn’t important American writers study Hawaiian coral reefs, home to more than 7,000 marine species? Roosevelt believed that an accurate inventory of Hawaii’s fauna and flora in the form of a popular book was sadly needed.

Roosevelt’s intense interest in Hawaii went back to his expansionist fever of the 1890s. In 1893, in fact, Roosevelt had cheered as American colonists, mainly sugarcane growers, toppled a kingdom and replaced it with the republic of Hawaii. As assistant secretary of the navy he had lobbied Congress fervently to annex the island for strategic reasons. That effort had become a standard part of his public business in 1898. On April 30, 1900, Hawaii finally became an official U.S. territory; and a jubilant Roosevelt couldn’t wait to loll on the sand beaches, watching the surf roll in, perhaps using the Hawaiian Islands as stepping-stones on his way to Japan or Australia.

Doing his homework, Roosevelt now homed in on saving the far northwestern Hawaiian Island chain in the mid-Pacific, including Nihoa, Necker, French Frigate Shoals, Gardner Pinnacles, Maro Reef, Laysan Island, Lisianski Island, and Pearl and Hermes atolls, before leaving the White House. There were twenty-one islands plus smaller ones contiguous to the big nine. Executive Order 1019 designated the entire chain as a single federal bird reservation.* While Pearl Harbor was the supreme port, the Hawaiian Islands Federal Bird Reservation had such stunningly diverse wildlife—including blue gray noddies, wolf spiders, and monk seals—that as an ecosystem it defied classification.16 Geologists supposed that these islands were the summits of submerged mountains, but that was only a guess. An intruder’s foot would step on a bird burrow with practically every stride.17 Everywhere there are birds,” ornithologist William Palmer wrote on the islands of Executive Order 1019, “thousands upon thousands of albatross, white and brown, in great, distinct colonies; great rookeries of terns and petrels and frigate birds; countless rail run everywhere in the long grass; bright red tropical honey birds, bright yellow finches flutter in the shrubs; curlews scream; ducks quack; crake chirp all the day.”18

Today, 100 years after Roosevelt created the Hawaiian Islands Federal Bird Reservation, many of the small lagoons have still not been mapped. Biologists called the archipelago a wonder of ornithological activity. On French Frigate Shoals alone, in 1909 there were eighteen species of sea-birds including the rare black-footed albatross, Laysan albatross, Bonnien petrel, Bulwer’s petrel, and wedge-tailed shearwater, among other unusual species. On French Frigates Shoals a 120-foot volcanic rock rose over the lagoon, which was alive with growing reefs.19 At Gardner Pinnacles—two barren-looking rock outcroppings—new spider species would soon be discovered. The first aerial photograph of Maro Reef showed a pork-chop-shaped atoll in which the coral reefs shot out like spokes from a huge wheel. Discovered by an American whaling ship in 1920, Maro Reef was a “rough quadrangular wreath of white breakers.”20

A real Robinson Crusoe adventure could be had at Laysan Island, where few if any human footprints could be found. The island was discovered in 1828 by an American captain sailing to the Orient, and the ornithologist Walter K. Fisher